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Carolyn Heilbrun
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“Today's youth seem finally to have understood that only by freeing woman from her exclusively sexual role can man free himself from his ordained role in the rat-race: that of the rat.”
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“... the term 'androgyny' ... defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate.”
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“Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes ...”
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“Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.”
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“But ideas move rapidly when their time comes.”
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“Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.”
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“The genuine solitaries of life fear intimacy more than loneliness. The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.”
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“Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.”
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“Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.”
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“Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.”
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“... power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told ...”
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“The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.”
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“... a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support both together and each individually.”
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“The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.”
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“Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.”
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“A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.”
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“... since we did not wish to die, surely we must have wished to grow old?”
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“Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.”
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“The point of quotations is that one can use another's words to be insulting.”
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“All good marriages are remarriages.”
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“What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.”
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“Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.”
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“Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years.”
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“Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world, and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment against those who have taken our Eden from us.”
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“We cannot guess the outcome of our actions ... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.”
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“We in middle age require adventure.”
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“I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.”
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“Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.”
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“Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?”
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“... for those retired, with too much time and no world, a world must be found, and not necessarily one that is heavily populated. One can join a group or work alone; the essential ... is that the work be difficult, concentrated, and that definite progress can be measured ... the purpose ... is ... to maintain a carefully directed intensity. ... Here the question is one of time, and to what all that remaining time should be devoted.”
Carolyn Heilbrun, U.S. writer, social critic, educator
(1926 - 2003)
Full name: Carolyn Gold Heilbrun. She wrote academic mysteries as Amanda Cross (see also quotations under that name).